Finishing an addition to our home so there will be new gear. Question: I have a roughly 25' x 24' x 10' room. The area where the tv and stereo will be is roughly 10' x 10", centered on a 15' wide area between a fireplace and glass sliders.. The glass sliders on the right of the schematic that overlook a lake, so no drapery. I'll have a large area rug that covers the area between the TV (blue) and the couch and that's it for treatment. All chairs (yellow) are armless. Speakers in red. And I'll be using an AVR with either Dirac or Anthem's ARC. LP is in an equilateral triangle. I plan on listening on axis. So will the windows cause more problems with narrower dispersion or wide dispersion speakers? I know there will be bounce on the right channel but is it worth considering in the choice of speaker. Note: floorpan/furniture cannot move.
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Wide or narrow dispersion for this room?
- Thread starter Reed
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Difficult to say because we have no idea what you like, how you listen or what you focus on. In general I'd say that you need particularly limited dispersion for it to make a huge difference in that scenario, all else equal. Small speakers have no real control over dispersion below a few kHz so you'd need a rather large horn or something of that sort to dispersion-control your way out of problematic first reflections.
Glass is problematic in that it won't reflect equally over the whole range - and it will likely ring more than a solid wall. So I would really look into minimizing the effect of those first reflections any way I could.
Glass is problematic in that it won't reflect equally over the whole range - and it will likely ring more than a solid wall. So I would really look into minimizing the effect of those first reflections any way I could.
Probably of little help as my experience so far doesn’t really have any definitive conclusions, but…
-I have had JBL 708P in our living room as well as Revel 226be. Both were very good, but prefer the wider dispersion 226be quite a bit more as they seem to disappear and sound good everywhere
-I have had Revel m16/m106/c208 in my theater room as well as 708P. In the theater room it seems I prefer the narrower dispersion of the 708p’s. It could be dispersion or something else, hard to say.
This probably is of little value, but though it was potentially a little helpful. Revel F208’s or F226/8be seem to sound nice wherever you put them it seems.
Thanks for posting the drawing of the room. That is VERY helpful.
The windows will cause more problems with wide-dispersion speakers, especially since it's impractical to either absorb or diffuse or re-direct that energy. Narrow-pattern speakers will result in less energy going into the first reflection area. You might even consider experimenting with extreme toe-in such that the speaker axes criss-cross slightly in front of the listening area, to further reduce the early energy bouncing off the windows.
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dshreter
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I agree narrow dispersion should be preferable to reduce any imbalance. But there are different perspectives on whether a strong first reflection is even problematic, and I’m not going to take sides on that point here.
As you look for speakers, controlled even dispersion across the frequency range will be even more important than narrow or wide due to the strong first reflection, so ensure you are not compromising on that aspect whatever choice you make.
As you look for speakers, controlled even dispersion across the frequency range will be even more important than narrow or wide due to the strong first reflection, so ensure you are not compromising on that aspect whatever choice you make.
As 3 have already mentioned, since the glass can't be tamed, go narrow.
Here's what I did with my windows.
Saves on my heating and cooling bills too!
Here's what I did with my windows.
Saves on my heating and cooling bills too!
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I once had a listening area with glass on 3 sides - behind speakers and both side walls. The only speaker I tried that worked really well was a point source horn setup.
I never tied the Kii3, but that was also recommended
I never tied the Kii3, but that was also recommended
@Reed , this occurs to me: That's a pretty big airspace. Although you've defined the listening area as roughly ten feet by ten feet, the actual airspace that the woofers will be "seeing" looks like it's about 30 feet by 28 feet. So I would expect this room to be challenging for small speakers.
I assume that the large dark brown horizontal rectangle is the couch where you'd sit for serious listening - is this correct?
And, does it matter how the system sounds for listeners in the orange chairs, and/or for listeners well outside the 10 x 10 foot listening area?
I assume that the large dark brown horizontal rectangle is the couch where you'd sit for serious listening - is this correct?
And, does it matter how the system sounds for listeners in the orange chairs, and/or for listeners well outside the 10 x 10 foot listening area?
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You can also cross the speakers in front of the listening position and eliminate reflections arriving too early from the right wall.
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95% of the time, only two people will be on the couch although we always have it on in the background. I will have at least one sub to start. I’ll add that we don’t listen loud. Beyond the couch, I’m not concerned.
This is the typical situation, that most have to live with - a room with less than optimal acoustic properties, and placement of speakers, furniture and listeners that needs to meet practical and aesthetic requirements. In a dedicated room, the situation would of course be very different, but that is not what we have, and even if there is a dedicated room in the house, there will be a need for some sort of sound reproduction on the living room where all people can enjoy movies, series, streamed, youtube, music.
This room is quite close to a room which I happen to have measurements from, non-treated space with large window on one wall, a little larger than the smaller rooms.
Forget all about acoustic treatment, that simply will not happen. So you are left with speakers and placement and calibration. Placement is already fixed, so only very small adjustments can be made here, perhaps move the speakers some 10-30cm distance from the front wall, toe can be adjusted, move the coach a very limited distance, perhaps less than 20cm can be done, from a practical point of view.
With separate bass-system and dsp, calibration will fix all bass issues. And since there is no need for very high capacity, there is no need for a large bass-system that requires space. This was the good news.
So what about the speakers. Can speakers be made to create high performance sound that works in such a space. Well, only partially successful. Compared to typical speakers you can buy in a shop today, it can be much better, but it can not remove the problems completely. The sound eventually enters the room, and gets reflected around those surfaces, regardless of how the speaker radiates.
Here are the measurement that shows how this works:
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What about the room, and how can measurements show if there is potential for huge improvements.
Obviously, looking at the frequency response in a simple way does not give any answers. But if we look at the decay profile, we see large differences between the treated rooms and a typical non-treated space. The treated rooms have a much faster decay profile, and decay is smoother across the whole frequency range. Also, early reflection level usually is much better.
Look at this room, a small room, treated properly:
Now compare to this non-treated space, same speakers, and room correction has been implemented to improve tonality of the decay profile:
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Here we see that the non-treated room actually still has noticeable early reflection attenuation, but the decay is too slow.
In this non-treated room, voices from the speakers had better clarity and intelligibility than a person talking in the room. Still, not good enough to be classified as high performance sound reproduction. What was achieved, after some tweaking on the dsp, was decent tonal balance, sound that fills the room, sort of a sound-stage with instruments and performers up front. Perhaps most important, the transient response ("dynamics") is decent, none of that dull, softened sound character.
With ordinary speakers, this is not be possible to achieve. You could use "narrow" speakers and reduce image shift due to reflections from the windows, but end up with something that sounds like 2 speakers playing music and the whole thing collapsing when you move a little out from the center. Omni speakers can fill the room better, but then it will always sound like a diffuse fog of sound. A speaker with omni-to-narrow pattern, like most hifi speaker are, gives you the worst of both worlds - diffuse, does not fill the room properly.
Having worked on solutions for this for quite some time now, I have come to the conclusion that it can only be partially solved, due to physics involved, there is only so much that can be done.
Everyone so far knows more about this than I which is why I would try speakers like Dutch and Dutch 8c where you set boundaries and use REW to get the best at the main listening position which I would try to get as close as possible. Good luck lord knows my room isn't great either but I guess I have gotten used to it.
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